Website Hosting & Domain Name
As well giving your website a name such as 'Joe Bloggs Saddlery' that you will display proudly on your web pages you will also need to give it and register a domain name.
To find out more about domain names and to find out if the domain name you want is available see 'Getting a Doman Name'.
Hosting
To get your website online you will need a hosting company. Hosting companies, as the name suggests host your files on their servers and by doing so make your website available on the internet.
It actually makes sense to get your domain name and hosting from the same company. See 'Hosting - Get On Line'
For simplicity you can think of a domain name as the address that visitors will type into their internet browser to access your website. The actual name display name of your website and the domain name can be different, but in normal circumstances we would recommend that they are as similar as possible.
For this reason we recommend thinking about and registering your domain name early in the design process. (NOTE 'We Build' customers can leave domain name and hosting issues to us.)
There are many companies out their that will sell you domain names and hosting services. We suggest that you use the same company for both. For the most part we use www.1and1.co.uk for registering domain names and for hosting services.
You can check the availability of and indeed register your chosen domain with 1and1 using the domain name checker utility below. Type your chosen website name (without the www etc) in the box, select the type of name you want from the drop down list and click check now.
Tip 1 Read the section below on hosting first.
Tip 2 Your name should have no spaces use hyphens (-) to separate words as in fresh-web-templates.
For simplicity you can view Hosting as simply meaning that the hosting company will sell you space on their servers which are connected to the internet to store your web files. Your web files are in turn therefore available on the internet.
Your web space will include space for files, bandwidth for traffic to your site and will usually include email addresses specific to your domain. In addition you will get access to utilities for managing the files in your web space. Many companies, including 1and1 will also give you free software, access to databases, marketing programs and free domain names. So if you are buying a domain name and you will need hosting it makes sense to shop for the hosting first. By default you will be invited to get a domain name at the same time.
The hosting packages on offer will vary across companies and there will be different packages available which get progressively more expensive as you go up the range. The important point here is to select a company that allows you to upgrade at anytime without penalty.
Again we recommend www.1and1.co.uk. Depending on how large you expect your website to be you could possible start off with Linux or MS shared hosting 'Home' or 'Business' package. You can read more about the packages and compare the features of them all on the 1and1 site.